Businesses and individuals rely on legally executed documents in a variety of contexts, from completion of complex forms used by governments and institutions (e.g., insurance forms, car loan and purchase forms, and the like), to simple contracts between individuals (e.g., lease agreements, wills, and a host of miscellaneous arrangements), with a range of contracts in between.
Documents signed by overnight envelope take a minimum of one day to reach the recipient and an additional day to be returned. Due to intra-office distribution delays and recipients' tendency to put paper documents in to-do piles, the average cycle time using overnight envelopes is 5-7 days. Documents signed by fax have an average cycle time of 2-3 days, due to intra-office delays, procrastination of paper document tasks, and fax machine mishaps. Faced with the burden of signing a paper document and returning it by fax, scan, or mail, many recipients put it down on their desk and forget about it.
As a result, users are increasingly turning to exchanging executed documents online. These documents not only include a field for including a signature, such as the type described above, but may be more complex to include additional fields that may require the signer to initial, sign, or take some other action. However, in a large document, signers may easily lose track of how many such fields they are required to complete (i.e., sign, initial, fill with data), and how many they already have completed. Thus, when users of an online document exchange program encounter problems, such as a signer not completing a document, or a signer not understanding what actions are required, they turn to customer support. This not only slows down the completion progress of a signing event, but also increases the load on customer support.
For such complex electronic documents, signer users typically are provided with limited guidance. The signer user is expected to use general navigation techniques, such as scrollbars, arrow keys, tab buttons, and the like, to move from one information field to the next. Many users, even in this age of computer technology, are relatively unsophisticated with respect to navigating through electronic documents, and relying solely on general-purpose navigation techniques makes form-filling a tedious, lengthy process. This often is compounded by complicated and poorly designed forms. Thus, there remains a need for a system and method to facilitate completion of electronic documents, particularly complex documents with multiple information entry fields.